Mission Accomplished: How America Might Turn Away From A Live Pandemic

The tone around the coronavirus pandemic certainly has changed.

President Donald Trump, Republicans, Fox News, and the Right Wing media have turned again in the last few days. It began with a total denial of the dangers of the virus, the framing of a “hoax” perpetrated by Democrats and liberals and the media. It was the “common flu” and no reason whatsoever to shut anything down. Then, when the deaths began climbing, everyone pivoted abruptly. They had always taken this thing seriously, how could you think otherwise?

Now, as we near Easter Sunday, the day Trump had irresponsibly targeted weeks ago, the conversation has once again shifted. Now, with thousands dead and thousands more certain to die, it’s a “victory” over “an invisible enemy” and time to get back to work.

We are in peak pandemic right now. Our hospitals are still overwhelmed and tens of thousands of Americans are either fighting for their lives are near losing them. But that suffering is behind closed doors and the media is getting restless.

Major League Baseball is itching to unfurl an insane plan to get games back up and running in the desert but hasn’t even begun considering the ramifications and fates of its workers or the staffs who would have to serve their infrastructure.

All conversation has shifted to economic bailouts and “reopening the country.”

It is a recipe for a disaster on a massive scale, but a disaster that may go completely unnoticed.

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The United States of America has an object permanence problem.

Or rather, an inability to recognize that things continue even while they are out of sight.

It is a result of a hypercapitalistic, voyeuristic, tabloid media that has been looking for sensationalistic stories since at least the 19th century. Our media has unfortunately become the eyes of the nation, and its focus either raises events to national concern or hides them from our perception of reality with dire results.

This tragedy has played itself out for centuries now, but in the last two decades alone the examples are legion. The tragedy that was Hurricane Katrina received coverage because of its scope and undeniable rankness, but a slow-moving disaster in Flint, Michigan, wherein the governmental and societal bonds frayed completely as clean drinking water, the most essential of resources, was ignored in favor of flashier, easier to understand stories.

We have a whole host of these problems in America that are simply ignored. Our infrastructure is crumbling. Our education system has become a shambling shell of itself after decades of siege by the Republican Party, libertarian billionaires, and a corporate world that prefers vulnerable, ignorant employees over well-educated citizens. Our healthcare system has been exposed during the pandemic, but the media hasn’t so much as bothered to talk about how monied interests laid the groundwork for this tragedy by staving off any reform and ensuring an inept system continued.

But for a precursor to what we might watch now in this damned, awful time, we must look to the Iraq War, one of the most obvious and tragic mistakes in American history, and how the media was complicit in both the drum up to conflict but also the ignoring of the consequences.

For those paying attention in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the media beat the drums of war and gave the Bush Administration all of the airtime and credibility it could want to frame the illegal action as necessary and vital. The war itself was a ratings bonanza, replete with glitzy graphics, dramatic music, video packages, and symbols of American exceptionalism setting the tone.

A month and a half after hostilities began, President George W. Bush flew in a fighter jet to the USS Abraham Lincoln to give a now infamous speech that declared victory in the Iraq War. It was a season finale for a made-for-TV movie, and over time the coverage of the Iraq War left the focus of the country.

Of course, that wasn’t the end of the Iraq War. Thousands more would die as an insurgency took hold and drug the United States into a neverending, disastrous quagmire. But it happened largely in the nation’s newspapers and magazines, far, far, far away from our television screens. It seemed like it didn’t exist as it was easy to ignore.

Now, like the opioid epidemic, the destruction of the middle class, and the murder of Middle America, there is a very real possibility the coronavirus pandemic will be treated like that damned war and situated far from the public eye. Yes, Americans will still die by the thousands. In fact, the “reopening” of the country, which would just be Americans foregoing the advice of experts and medical professionals, as they have been trained to do, would make sure that many more thousands would die than necessary.

But the cameras and the round-the-clock coverage would be gone. The segments would dry up. Perhaps there would be the occasional C-block focus piece. Maybe a 60 Minutes examination. But the extent of the damage would happen without America knowing because, for America, what we see on our televisions is more real than the real in which we live.

Jared Yates Sexton is a political analyst whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. He is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. He currently serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.